Unlike the World Trade Center, the 580/980/880/80 overpass was reinforced against earthquakes and was not under the enormous compressive load that the towers were when they fell. The overpass was designed to support gridlocked traffic in an earthquake, but it collapsed without even a single car on it. The fire consumed only 8,600 gallons of fuel, whereas the WTC was allegedly brought down by 24,000 gallons of fuel. Does Governor Schwarzenegger really expect us to believe a story even more preposterous than the already-discredited official story about 9/11?To answer the question “Who is responsible for this terrible tragedy?” we must ask who stood to gain the most. George Soros? The California Department of Transportation? The Jews?

We pray that those drawn to the 4/29 issue by sensationalist claims will stay long enough to learn the less theatrical but equally damning truth.

This is hilarious!

4/29truth.com

CalicoPenny let us know about yet another "30 days" effort, this one to name the names of major companies infected with spam-spewing bots. Support Intelligence began the effort on March 28, out of frustration at not being able to attract the attention of anyone who could fix the problems at these companies.

Adam and Rick back in the news.

Slashdot | Exposing Bots In Big Companies

John Young
Cryptome Org
251 West 89th Street
New Yor, NY 10024

RE: www.cryptome.org

Dear Mr. Young,

This letter is to notify you that we are terminating your service for violation of our Acceptable Use Policy, effective Friday May 4, 2007. We are providing you with two week notice to locate another service provider.

Sincerely,

VERIO INC.
an NTT Communications Company

!! Absolutely no explanation given. The site is EXTREMELY slow right now, I suspect a number of people are attempting to mirror it prior to it's disappearence. Cryptome is one of the most important anti-censorship resources on the Internet. Its existance on the net is certainly a canary in the first amendment rights coal mine. Expect a widespread reaction when it finally goes away this Friday.

Cryptome Shutdown by Verio/NTT

The court decision determined that recommendation algorithms that rely on usage data to build playlists server-side are still eligible for broadcast license, thereby substantially lowering the costs of operating a music recommendation site.

MemeStreams could generate agent based music under the compulsary license. The Industrial Memetics conspiracy is functioning perfectly. Muhahaha. :)

Slashdot | Court Rules Playlist Customization Is Not Interactive

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday moved to loosen a key legal standard used in patent cases, potentially making it easier in some cases to get the federal courts to invalidate a patent as obvious.

In a case involving vehicle throttle pedals, the justices unanimously said the courts should be more flexible in the way they interpret the standard for whether patents are valid or merely "obvious" combinations of previous inventions that should be rejected.

Supreme Court loosens patent 'obviousness' test | CNET News.com

This is an awesome round up of stories from possibly noteworthy. I've only read through a fraction of them. If you are looking for a good place to jump off into some Sunday evening reading, peruse this post.

At the end of the day, he remembered thinking, "I can't believe I found all those answers in one place."

At the end of the day, I, like everyone else, just sidestepped the helpful knowledge, eager to continue fucking up. No one ever learns lessons. You just smile and continue bullshitting. That’s the American way.

Priest recognizes the barriers women have conquered but suggests that even the most successful professional woman wants a man at the end of the day.

"At the end of the day, nobody is above the law of physics." [ Before lunch, however ... ]

Some people would argue that working at Google is more exciting, but [Google employees] are working incredible hours. And at the end of the day, you have to ask, ’Is that a good deal?'

At the end of the day, we all pile into each other's hotel rooms ...

At the end of the day diversification is what matters most.

"Every race has its good and bad. At the end of the day it's not what they look like, it's about what they do, their actions."

At the end of the day, when I’m old and decrepit, I can give it to my grandkids and say, ‘here, this is what your grandpa used to do.’

And at the end of the day we were proud of what we did.

There are not that many guys who see it on as consistent a basis. At the end of the day, I love to get sacks, but if I don’t, as long as my teammates are getting the benefits, I’ve got to swallow it ...

Furthermore, at the end of the day, you’ll be able to say with conviction that you left all that you had on the floor.

Answers may vary, but one thing is for sure, there is no escaping the fact that at the end of the day, this is ... [ Read More (0.7k in body) ]

'At the end of the day'

Electronics giant Sony has sparked a major row over animal cruelty and the ethics of the computer industry by using a freshly slaughtered goat to promote a violent video game.

The corpse of the decapitated animal was the centrepiece of a party to celebrate the launch of the God Of War II game for the company’s PlayStation 2 console.

Guests at the event were even invited to reach inside the goat’s still-warm carcass to eat offal from its stomach.

Topless girls added to the louche atmosphere by dipping grapes into guests’ mouths, while a male model portraying Kratos, the game’s warrior hero, handed out garlands.

In a word, "wow."

That's a party...

Slaughter: Horror at Sony's depraved promotion stunt with decapitated goat | the Daily Mail

Plenty of ink has been spilled in arguments over the proper business model for music in the P2P age. The publishers generally want to hold onto the current market-based system, but there are voices in the wilderness arguing that a compulsory license model actually makes the most sense for both artists and consumers. One of those voices is Steven Page, singer and guitarist for the Barenaked Ladies, who recently spoke to Ars about this issue and called for an ISP-based licensing model that would allow consumers access to all the music they want and would ensure that artists get paid. But the US Register of Copyrights, Marybeth Peters, calls this a bad idea.

Here's the idea: compulsory licenses allow anyone to take advantage of whatever works are covered by the license without obtaining the permissions that would otherwise be required. It is essentially an exception made to copyright law that takes away a person's right to control how copies of their material are handled. This doesn't mean a compulsory license is free, though, only that the rate is determined by statute.

The best known of these in the US is the mechanical license. Songwriters and their publishers receive this rate—currently set at $.091 per song—for every copy of an album sold that features their song. Music labels are free to negotiate a lower rate, and many do (75 percent of the mechanical rate is common), but they can simply choose to pay the mechanical royalty rate without negotiations.

But will it happen? The nation's top copyright official, Marybeth Peters, said at a recent LexisNexis/Variety DRM conference that it's not something she wants to see. "I hope we don't go to a system of compulsory licenses," she said. "I don't see how any creator benefits from a compulsory license." None of the other industry executives expressed much love for the plan, either, arguing that the market would work out all of its current interoperability problems on its own, and that a compulsory license would stifle innovation.

But Page is adamant. "We need to get our music where our fans want it," he says, "not the other way around."

I've been talking about blanket licensing in regard to music downloads for a long time now. I think it is a good idea, but I don't like the ISP based model suggested here. What about people who use the Internet and are not interested in downloading music? It's not fair to those people, and those people do exist in large numbers. It would just create an unfair situation to replace our current unworkable situation.

I think where we really need blanket compulsory licensing is at the level of the music downloading services and applications. If anyone who is building a P2P application or a music downloading service can get legitimate rights to do so, the market for music online will diversity, grow, and change as we want it to. We would see different approaches to providing music online if everyone who wanted to could open their own music downloading service.

We really want the reporting about what is being downloaded to be as specific as possible. We don't want to take the approach PROs take to radio, and dole out royalties based upon sampling what is present in the P2P networks. That type of system has a disproportional benefit to larger artists.

In order to get the desired level of specific reporting of downloads at the ISP level, we would have to institute what amounts to total monitoring of Internet connections. We don't want that kind of infrastructure to even exist at the ISP level, as it would eventually be horribly abused. Let music downloading services and applications handle that role.

Barenaked Ladies: If I had a compulsory blanket music license

News Corp.'s popular social networking site MySpace launched a test version of its new China service on Friday, making a late entry into the intensely competitive Chinese Internet market.

MySpace China will be a Chinese-owned company with backing from MySpace Inc., the IDG venture capital firm and a Chinese investment fund, the company said. Spokespeople for the company refused to give an ownership breakdown or say which investor would control it.

"Based on the MySpace global brand and technology platform, we will develop products and features that are tailored to today's Chinese citizens," Luo Chuan, a former Microsoft Corp. executive who is to lead the venture, said in a prepared statement.

The strategy of having a Chinese company operate the service follows the approach of Yahoo Inc., eBay Inc. and other Internet competitors that have turned to local partners to run their China operations after struggling to win market share.

News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch said in September the company was looking for a way to enter China without running into political obstacles and "heavy weather" faced by Google and Yahoo.

Murdoch said his Chinese-born wife, Wendi Deng, was playing a key role in helping to launch the China-based service.

News Corp. has tried to expand in China but has been stymied by restrictions on foreign media ownership.

MySpace makes belated entry into China - CNN.com

In May, London-based Hip Hop artist M.I.A. revealed that she was denied a visa to come work with American music producers on her next album. News reports indicate that the Sri Lankan-born artist was excluded because government officials concluded that some of her lyrics are overly sympathetic to the Tamil Tigers and the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

Here is some background on MIA:

Level 2 is a bit thornier. Arular's lyrics don't seem to mean much, but they're catchy as all hell: "Blaze to blaze, galang-a-lang-a-lang-a/Purple haze, galang-a-lang-a-lang," she sings on "Galang," her debut single from last year. You notice a few other catchphrases, too, like "freedom fighter," "Pull up the people/Pull up the poor," and "I got the bombs to make you blow/I got the beats to make you bang." Whatever—none of this means much, in and of itself. Intrigued, you go to her incredibly psychedelic Web site (www.miauk.com) and wait for a Flash animation to load. The graphic shown on the screen while you wait is a cute cartoon image of bundled sticks of dynamite, ready to explode. You read her bio and see that she had a rough childhood; she lived in war-torn Sri Lanka as a kid, and her father wasn't around much. He was in the Tamil Tigers, where his nickname was "Arular"—the title of M.I.A.'s album. You don't know much about the Tamil Tigers, besides the fact that they don't seem to be a baseball team, and read on. It looks like she moved to the U.K. with her mother as a refugee a little over 15 years ago. Since then, she's turned her life around, graduating from a top British art school and making a name for herself by playing with loaded images, tearing them out of context and throwing them onto canvases: bright, Warhol-esque screen prints of war and strife, from guns and bombs to tigers.

So is MIA a threat to state security? Somehow, I don't think so.

As far as idealogical slants go, rock n' roll, hiphop, and just about every other form of popular music has been a dangerous threat to the state at one point or another. Not to go into one of those arguments that contains the phrase "slippery slope", but common people.. [ waves his hand ] These are not the threats to the state you are looking for...

Ladies and Gentlemen, just because we killed Mother Russia in the 80's doesn't mean we have to take her place in the uh-oh's...

Musical Threats to The State | Will the Jedi Mind Trick work?